Seclurm: Devolution

by Noah Gallagher

  “Rosalyn is. I’m at the terminal right beside the beam. Didn’t you live in New Mexico for a while?”

  “Uh…yeah, when I was in college. How is that relevant?”

  She could hear him wiping sweat from his brow. “Because it’s hot as Hell in here. Maybe you should have come here instead. SNTNL recommended one of us to remain at the terminal to communicate with you and monitor the reactor, so I stayed. Not out of cowardice of course.”

  “I know,” Terri said with a frown and a twitch of her eyebrows.

  “I just try to get out of her way, you know?”

  She sighed. “When did I let that woman become more intimidating than me? It’s humiliating.”

  “Well, anyway, SNTNL showed me how to set the intercom system to tap into specific rooms’ speakers. If Rosalyn reaches a terminal deep in the core, she might be able to hear me. I just thought it might be good for you to test out opening the pipe covers and see how fast the flow is. We want to make sure we time it right so we don’t drown Rosalyn. And make sure there will even be enough. SNTNL seemed to think that there’d be enough Seclurm flowing throughout the city to fill almost this entire room, which would be hard to believe if I hadn’t spent several hours wandering through these ruins.”

  “Man, I hate this place.”

  “Me too—but yeah, try opening them to see how quickly the liquid level will rise so we know how we should time it. It could take a long time for it to fill up. But if it turns out that it’s flowing too fast, you should be able to close them again so we don’t drown.”

  She shook her head and sighed. “Alright. SNTNL, can you guide me through this?”

  SNTNL helped her find the options on the screen to open up all the many Seclurm pipe flaps that ringed the great big reactor room all at once, and she pressed it.

  Then she waited.

  “…Did you press it?” Sam asked, puzzled.

  “Yeah, don’t you see the great, big flood happening all around us right now?” She paused a moment before continuing, “It’s not working, genius.”

  this is not good news. something must be busted.

  Sam swallowed and said, “Rosalyn has no idea we can’t turn them on. Until and if she comes across a specific place in the lower core where I can contact her, she won’t know!”

  by then it may be too late. we needed the flood of seclurm to make sure the aliens climbing up into the core are killed. if thats not happening when she finds the solution to our core problem she will die.

  Terri looked over her shoulder at the door, biting her lip. Turning back to the window, she beheld the core beam burning with tremendous energy. “What are we supposed to do, then?” she asked.

  There was a short silence. Then Sam spoke very carefully. “Terri, there’s…another way to do this. I think it’s the only way, actually. One of us needs to take a neutron-scatterer and go blast open each of the pipe covers.”

  She gave out a sharp, loud sigh. “Oh, that sounds fun. Why don’t you go do that, Sammy?”

  someone needs to monitor the state of the reactor core. theres no time to switch places. we are sorry terri but you are the only one who can do this.

  Her heart dropped down into her stomach and didn’t come back up. She shut her eyes and stewed there for a long moment.

  “…Terri? Are you alright?”

  She said nothing for a second. Then she cocked her head and breathed, “When this is over…if we survive…I hope you’ll understand if I never speak to you again.”

  “Hey, don’t threaten me with a good time.”

  She rolled her eyes and took her finger off the intercom. She couldn’t believe she was doing this, but at this point what could she do but help? The more she cooperated, the better their chances of survival.

  “When you’re done, meet us at the terminal on the reactor core!” Sam instructed. “Good luck!”

  With SNTNL’s aid Terri called a spare gondola to the building, with which she could travel to each Seclurm pipe covering—either external along the wall or internal, accessible within one of the wall-hanging structures—and use the neutron-scatterer to forcefully open them up.

  With a tremendous, piercing pit in her stomach she kept her gun at the ready and made her way outside the building to the rail-less landing where a rickety-looking spare gondola came to a slow stop.

  Hating everything more with each step she went onto it, testing each part of the floor with her foot before putting her full weight upon it, and then pressed the button to make it go. SNTNL had done something on the computer to make it go where it needed to go, one stop at a time.

  Gazing out at the expansive room, she saw at least twenty-five large pipe coverings around its circumference that she would need to open up. Most of them she wouldn’t need to leave the gondola to shoot, but others were reachable only within the structures.

  Structures that were, hopefully, empty.

  Terri hummed a favorite childhood tune to herself as the gondola rumbled through the air on the network of thick cords. The sounds of distant creatures far beneath her didn’t seem very distant, and she felt as if she were watching vermin skittering around her own kitchen floor.

  The gondola approached the first Seclurm pipe cover, set in the wall between two large structures, one thin and the other bulbous. Terri turned at a cable junction and stopped just thirty feet in front of the cover, which was of a solid but rusty-looking metal about twenty feet in diameter.

  Oh, I hope we don’t regret doing this, she thought as she lifted up the gun and lined up a shot.

  She could feel her heart leaping as she slowly steadied her aim and pulled the trigger. The gun blasted backward with a flash of light, throwing her back a couple inches. A four or five foot hole opened up in the metal, and black Seclurm began to flow out and down.

  She fired repeatedly, shooting at every part of the cover until the current of Seclurm was so strong that it broke through the remaining pieces. The outpouring was strong, and Terri watched it fall what could have been hundreds of feet down into the distant and vast abyss.

  We’re definitely going to need all of these things flowing for it to do anything, she thought as she tapped the button to move to the next pipe, clinging to the gun with anxious hope it would see her through.

  ♦♦♦

  The dim red lights of the inner core illuminated Rosalyn’s difficult path just enough for her to continue squeezing through tight spaces and moving down steep staircases or around sudden corners. It was all still, and yet it hummed with unseen activity within the walls.

  Each new corner she took and each confined, vertical-flowing room she found herself in looked almost the same as the last, and yet felt like a new level of deep strangeness. Rosalyn heard her own breathing and the shifting of her body as she swung the gun around looking for anything that moved. To be killed by one of the aliens now would be a sad fate after coming so far. Increasingly she felt as if she were in a dream.

  She spotted no irregularities either: no indications that anything had been put out of place or that anything organic was down here at all, besides herself. But if SNTNL was correct, something was amiss down here—preventing the meltdown—and she would find and undo it if she had to travel through every inch of the place.

  Leaping down a short drop, she walked onto a strip of floor so thin against the wall she would need to sidle across it to avoid dropping down into a pit directly across it, a fifteen foot drop or so. Across the thin ledge, on the opposite corner of the room, was a staircase leading upward a few steps to a hallway glowing red.

  She took a deep breath and started sidling along the ledge step by step.

  Behind her, from where she’d dropped down, she heard vibrations that broke through the ever-present hum. She stopped to examine it for only a moment, and then kept sidling.

  Something down in the pit caught her gaze, and she stared down as she moved. Dancing shadows cutting through the red light. Thin, winding pipes rattling. Gears spinning. That chemica
l, oily smell becoming more prevalent.

  The metal wall she touched her back to was burning in the heat. A single drop of sweat fell from the top of her forehead and curled around the side of her eye. The bead stopped between her eye and cheek, itchiness gnawing at her skin. She grimaced as she continued shimmying along, unable to wipe it away for fear of not having her gun at the ready.

  From her right, at the far wall, there was a series of thick and intertwined pipes with just a few slivers of empty space between them. Something clanged against it. Rosalyn looked carefully for a long moment and thought she saw a whitish, semi-translucent finger peeking through one of the cracks.

  She lifted her gun and blasted at it.

  A shriek erupted from the acidic alien that lay behind the now-punctured pipes; the arm that was revealed bled purple and shrunk back.

  Rosalyn leapt onto solid ground and started for the staircase, but several terrible cries heralded the arrival of acidic aliens, each with drooping flesh, curled-up eyes, and thin, sharp teeth. They dashed on all fours from places in the room Rosalyn hadn’t even noticed: dropping from the ceiling, breaking through a thin wall, and climbing up from the pit. Snarling creatures with translucent frames that glowed red in the low light.

  Rosalyn let out a primal scream as she turned to face them and let loose with her weapon, blasting them black over and over. She was certain not to have enough ammo to kill even one of them; her best hope was to knock them away and run. That was why they needed the Seclurm flood, or she would have virtually no chance of survival.

  Once she had hit each of the aliens with at least one shot—she didn’t even count how many there were—she turned and dashed up the steps and through the shining red hallway.

  Now that she was inside it, she could see for herself why the hallway had glowed so brightly: a large sphere with many cords attached to it and a deep burn of crimson within was set into the wall. There, touching the sphere—and almost stopping Rosalyn in her tracks for shock—was a long and thin tentacle of deep black.

  Rough-looking and rippled, it reached from all the way down the hallway and caressed the sphere with a rhythmic motion as if it were feasting upon its light. When Rosalyn came closer to it, it swiftly slunk away until it vanished around the corner.

  What was that?! she wondered, feeling her insides trembling.

  Hearing pursuing thumps far behind her, she barreled through the hallway and emerged into a larger room shaped like a downward spiral. More aliens, each of the acid-secreting variety, were moving up the spiral. And coming for her.

  She had known this sort of thing would happen. And yet all she had was one barely-lethal gun to shoot them with. Maybe Terri was right—perhaps Rosalyn ought to have joined the military instead of FAER.

  As she made her way down, she blasted the voracious monsters back, trying her best to aim the shots such that they would fall off the edge. A few got very close to her, but none touched her. The only thing they left upon her was the ringing in her ears from their screams.

  Nearing the bottom of the spiral she wondered if she could ever really go back to a normal life if she survived.

  An alien burst out of a tall ventilation cover to her left and pushed her off the edge of the walkway screaming. She fell for a few moments before she landed on her back, stunned and unable to breathe for several long moments. The floor was scratchy and covered in broken bits of metal and wiring. By the time the wind was back in her lungs and she stumbled to her feet, four aliens were approaching her.

  Desperate, poorly-aimed blasts from the neutron-scatterer allowed her to run undeterred to the other end of the room, where she saw a few hallways of diverging paths.

  Another one of those shining, crimson globes strung with cords adorned the wall of the hallway here. The back of her entire, sweaty body stung horribly, but she somehow found herself thinking with clarity that those globes—and perhaps that tentacle-like thing she had seen—were the key to this puzzle of destroying the reactor.

  Many more shots from her weapon were necessary to ward off pursuing aliens as she wound her way through a network of halls. Her coat and pants and now-frizzy hair were soaked with sweat; the intense heat never relented.

  She came to a sudden stop as she caught sight of another two black tentacles in a hallway. They pulled away from her very deliberately.

  She chased them down. They zipped back around a corner. She followed suit.

  A dead end stared her in the face. No tentacles were anywhere in sight, but she could smell a Seclurm-like stench very thick in the air.

  The thin wall to her right broke free and started pushing into her, pinning her to the opposite wall. She let out a cry of pain and tried to push it away from her. Whatever was behind it was strong; the width of the sturdy gun was the only thing keeping her from being crushed into a pulp. She screamed as she struggled, but to no avail.

  Perhaps sensing her resistance, one of the tentacles crept past the edge of the crushing wall and moved towards Rosalyn. But she saw it before it reached her.

  A blinding blast reduced the tentacle’s “head” to a gory mess spewing grayish-red blood. It fell to the floor and slunk away like a snake, and Rosalyn felt the pressure of the wall against her body lessening. With renewed vigor she shoved it back just far enough to move the barrel of her gun towards it.

  A pull of the trigger made a sizable hole in the wall. Two pulls made one just large enough that when the wall came crashing back towards her, she was able to leap nimbly through it, rise to her feet, and behold the owner of the tentacles:

  A big, dark creature she had never seen before.

  ♦♦♦

  Each of the external pipe covers was now blasted open and spewing vividly dark Seclurm down, down into the bottom of the reactor room, but the level was still rising rather slowly. As much as Terri wanted to call it quits, she knew it wasn’t nearly enough.

  There were ten more pipe coverings to go, each one enclosed within a building. They could be spotted behind the large, slightly-tinted, glass windows that were set into the structures, and to her eye, they each looked much larger than the ones she had shot open already. That, at least, had given her hope.

  At present, she’d traveled via the gondola to five of the ten pipe-housing structures, each one a dark and disheveled place much like the one housing the control room, and she had been able to shoot open the windows and then the pipes adjacent from them, allowing the flow to exit through the broken windows and down into the room. So far, she hadn’t encountered anything dangerous, but she knew it was only a matter of time. With each shot of the gun, she imagined shooting a Seclurm-evolved alien lunging for her.

  Now the gondola stopped beside a landing on the west edge of the largest single structure in the room, aside from the reactor itself: a wide-spread building, or series of connected buildings, wherein were to be found the final five pipe coverings. Several wide, conical roofs crowned the dark gray buildings, and wide windows lined their middles. It possessed an almost palace-like feel.

  With all the remaining pipes in one single structure, Terri wouldn’t need the gondola anymore until she reached the other end of the palace and those five pipes were opened.

  A series of long and flat steps led up to an open, tall doorway. She had only time to catch her breath and to imagine what unexpected terror might befall her once she let her guard down. If she hadn’t known Rosalyn’s life was on the line, she would certainly have slowed her pace.

  SNTNL had claimed that there were a great many aliens flowing into the reactor room, although that was apparently mostly from the bottom. But SNTNL surely didn’t know everything, and besides, she didn’t have it with her now to inform her if something changed and all of them started coming after her.

  Please let them all be drowning at the bottom, she thought. The Seclurm level hadn’t risen all that high, but it was enough to start doing damage to any creatures on the very bottom, at least.

  She passed into the room and was swept
up by darkness. There were no lights in this building—perhaps it could be called the west wing of the “palace”—as had been the case with the others, and the tinted windows allowed only weak light inside. Through those big, darkened windows the light of the reactor’s energy beam seemed quiet and still, like a distant sunrise.

  The large chambers were almost pleasant (or perhaps were pleasant once), filled with tables and rows of seats, all slightly over-sized by human measuring. She scanned it all with unusually perceptive senses, her subconscious mind replaying over and over an image of Randy behind a sheet of perforated metal curling into a fetal position, dripping liquid, and becoming subsumed by a violet cocoon…

  Eventually she realized that she was trembling and her mouth was hanging open, and she shut it forcefully. Ruminating on the horrors of the past wouldn’t help her survive.

  Terri had never used a gun in her life, to her recollection. She’d seen them before during the less savory parts of her adolescence, but she’d never looked back when she got out of those sorts of situations. Now her life was entirely dependent upon using one—and one that wasn’t even crafted by humankind, to boot. She wasn’t sure what sort of strange message that proved, or irony that made. All she knew was the thing would keep her alive.

  She walked over the dusty remains of carpets covering the stone or metal floors and approached the first pipe covering, a huge, converse metal piece in the wall about thirty feet in circumference, reminiscent of a huge bank vault. With disbelieving gratitude that nothing seemed to be around, Terri went straight across from the cover and to the big window where she began puncturing a large hole in it with four carefully-aimed shots.

  The blasts echoed throughout the huge building. With the glass broken, she retreated to the cover, standing to the right of it so she wouldn’t be cut off from moving onward by the flow of Seclurm. If the other buildings had been any indication, there would be another gondola landing on the opposite side from which she could travel once this was done with.

  Positioning herself carefully out of the way of the impending flow, she blasted holes up through the middle of the cover, and Seclurm began pouring out. Sounds of powerful splashing filled her ears. Each new blast increased the flow until it pushed through the broken cover enough for Terri to decide it was time to move on to the next one.